The internets oldest domain name

Published on the 4th of February, 2008

Now imagine you were a computer geek transported back to 1985. There are no domains registered and you had the chance to register the first ever domain name. what would it be?

I StumbledUpon a list of the first 1 hundred domain names and I had to have a laugh, the first domain ever registered was not a 1 letter .com, not a 2 letter .com, not a 3 letter .com, not a 4,5,6,7 or 8 letter .com, it was a 9 letter word. Symbolics.com was the first ever domain. Now I have been using the internet for just under 15 years and only just found this out, so to me it is new and cool and one reason i like stumbleupon.

Interestingly it took 1 year for the first 10 domains to be registered, a year later another 50 had been registered and now 23 years latter we have pushed the limits to the point of driving anybody trying to find a new domain nuts!.

playing with the internet archive 2003 - 2008

Published on the 29th of January, 2008

Yesterday I was showing my partner a website that I had made several years ago using the web archive and that got me thinking. A lot has changed in the last few years, online, so I jumped over to alexa to see who the top 100 websites were in 2003 (English only) and decided to do a sort of where are they now.

Way back in 2003 the top 10 most trafficked websites according to alexa were

1. Yahoo (1)
2. MSN.com (5)
3. Google (2)
4. passport.net (210)
5. EBay (21)
6. Microsoft.com (15)
7. Amazon.com (19)
8. Go.com (47)
9. Hotmail (5 - now under MSN)
10. aol.com (46)

Now do you clearly remember 2003? that was the same year that Chicago won best Picture at the Oscars, Tampa Bay won the super bowl and beyonce went number 1 with Crazy In Love. It was "only 5 years ago".

News was the big issue in 2003, for a year we could hardly remember it was certainly where our attention was at. The major portals that were bringing in the traffic figures, MSN, Aol, Yahoo may still all be in the top 100, but even excite was still holding on to a top 50 position. And there were no less than 13 news/portals in the top 100 

Search engines will always be popular, but back in 2003 there were about 20 search engines, including such fond memories as overture, AltaVista and Lycos in the top 100. In 2008 they have largely been obliterated by the dominance of Google, of the current top 100 websites there are no less than 16 entries for Google using regional domains. Only about 6 search engines (yahoo, msn, Google, AOL, DMOZ ect) remain in the top 100.

do you remember gator.com? Software that made end users life a little easier by auto filling web forms was the bain of webmasters as they replaced advertising and affiliate links on websites with their own. Fortunately for us, they died a rather necessary death back in 2006, The only memory of them you may have is the lost revenue they stole from your affiliate links. Oh yer, they did manage to pull in at #13 back in 2003, they now live inconspicuously at #548,917 now if you had invested heavily in that little company back then you would probably would not have been very happy!

2003 was towards the end of what once was web 1.0 companies spent millions acquiring and building but never managed to monetize there acquisitions because of the drop in ad sales at the dawn of the new millennium. They spent their money acquiring old technology that was past its used by date instead of looking at the future. As an example let’s take a quick look at Lycos

Lycos once had over 1.2% of all traffic according to alexa, that figure 5 years later is down to 0.08% keep in mind that back in 98-99 they acquired 2 of the most potential websites on the internet, angelfire and tripod both of which were competing in the free hosting domain, where users were actively building and maintain what essentially was the for-runner to blogging, the personal homepage. By 2001 blogging had started to awaken and go main stream Lycos had a captive market ready and waiting and never took the step needed that would have taken angelfire or tripod head to head with Google’s soon to be acquired blogger.com (2003).

now forget competing with Google in search, the personal homepage war has been going ever since geocities first started and I doubt there are many serious web developers in the 25-35yr age demographic that did not once start out in geocities, angelfire or tripod. Geocities woke up to the world of blogging in mid 2006, surprise surprise, look at the traffic growth at that point. Lycos woke up as well, but by the time that happened the horse had already bolted.

Why tell you about this now?

I have another article I am working on for those of you out there looking to buy an established website that might just turn you off that "bargain" you just found, you know that proxy site, facebook application or myspace site you are thinking of buying. stay tuned!

Have you sold a website? tell us about it,

Published on the 22nd of January, 2008

We are looking to do a few Interviews with people who have bought or sold a website in the past. If you are interested in participating then please contact us.The questions will be fairly easy and not to time consuming, we are also working on a reward for your participation.

Lets predict some things...

Published on the 5th of January, 2008

Okay so again with the thinking while away (I love schedule posting)

Here is 5 predictions for 08

1. Gmail and Orkut will merge into one seemless product
2. Nobody will pay $300 Million for digg
3. Facebook will realise it is not worth $15 Billion, we took a stab at guestimating its value for gigles and came up with a maximum of $2 Billion no matter how hard we tried to value it.
4. Social Networking will not be the major battle field that people make it out to be
5. Microsoft will release an adwords clone

Here is 5 things we will do this year

1. Find the best websites to buy
2. Write more articles
3. Help more people sell for more
4. Help buyers determin the true value of a website
5. Give an entertaining insight into the big players movements.

Here is 5 things we wont do this year

1. List crap websites for sale, just to make a post
2. Keep 100% on topic
3. Charge to get your site listed on Fowler Rd
4. Not link to somewhere because they compete with us
5. List crap websites for sale, just to make a post

Here is 5 things we want this year

1. More Traffic
2. More Comments
3. More Posts
4. Additional writers
5. Exclusive listings

thats my 5 days 5 things post out of the way.. I promise this is the last post while I am away.

Add 5 words to the story!

Published on the 31th of December, 2007

So we are off on holidays tommorrow and have left a little something for you all to play with.

Have you ever played the 3/5 letter word game on a forum? It gets a little hard to follow because of the fragmentation so I made a little web app for it and now I can present you with the The Story Project where it goes nobody knows!